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SXSW Film Review: Malta (Natalia Santa, 2024)

Posted on
10 Mar 2024
by
Paul

Malta follows its protagonist Mariana through her day to day life, a life she feels to be unsatisfying on some level. As the film unfolds, director/writer Natalia Santa shows us exactly why Mariana is unhappy and what it is that she’s looking to escape from.

Though she lives with her family in Colombia, Natalia doesn’t have the most stable relationship with her mother and only seems to drop in when she feels like it, preferring to stay with a friend or with whoever she’s picked up at the bar that night. Often sleeping during the day and filling her nights with German classes and her job at a call centre, she’s clearly not happy with her routine.

Mariana longs for an escape from the drudgery of her life – a better place to hope for. Where exactly will this escape plan take her? It could have been anyplace really, but Malta is where she’s decided on.

Shaking up her routine a bit is the return of her brother Rigo, who, much like Mariana, is not quite happy with his lot in life, and the arrival in her life of a classmate who eventually becomes a romantic interest.

Considering that it’s the film’s namesake, it’s worth noting that Malta the country figures very little into the plot of Malta the film. Rather, it’s the idea of Malta – or more specifically, what it represents to Mariana – that matters. The question that hangs over the proceedings is not so much whether she makes it to Malta or not, but what it will take to shake Mariana out of her rut.

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